I miss Easter. Well, at least the Easter of my childhood.

Growing up, Easter was one of the Big Three. First Christmas, then Easter and, of course, my birthday (which I still can’t believe isn’t a national holiday).

It started with our Easter outfits.

My mom would spend weeks sewing her and my sister matching Easter dresses. Always white with hats.

And then, there would be the search for me and brother’s new ‘leisure’ suits. Yards of polyester in neon colors- we liked lime green.

And there was the shirt that went with the suit. Think John Travolta from Saturday Night Fever, only more garish.

The shirts were the piece de resistance. The ones I liked looked as if you had melted a box of Crayons- the big box of 64 with the built-in sharpener- and then dipped that shiny double knit polyester into it.

And the bigger the collar, the better.

Mine were so enormous that I could stand on the deck of the Mayflower and sail to the New World simply by turning up my collar.

The only person in my family who didn’t get a new outfit was my dad. He just wore one of his old boring black or gray suits but he did have a flower pinned to the lapel.

The ads for Easter would have already started long before the big day. Ads for the latest in high-tech Easter basket design with that fancy fake grass. And Peeps. Back then they only came in one flavor- pink.

I actually saw a display of Peeps in Dollar General this past week with sardine-flavored Peeps. Gross!

And for us kids, the pinnacle of Easter was not Christ’s resurrection. No, it was the multiple Easter Egg hunts.

Back then we didn’t have plastic eggs. I’m not sure if it was because plastic had not been invented yet or because my parents were just too cheap to go down to TG&Y and buy a bag or two.

We were egg traditionalists.

Hard boiled and colored at home.

You would buy kits to the dye eggs. They came with little tablets of dye that you would dissolve in vinegar and a tray to dry the eggs built right into the box.

I was always pushing the envelope of egg design by drawing on them with a crayon and then that little wire loopy-thing to dip them in multiple

colors.

After a few dips, they always came out the same color: doo doo brown.

Sometimes my mother would splurge and get those kits that also had little cardboard characters that cradled your muddy brown eggs. We felt rich when we got those.

The first egg hunt of the week was on Friday at school. They had those fancy plastic eggs.

Then there will be the egg hunt at home. Real eggs so well hidden that we would continue to discover them for weeks to come.

And then the Super Bowl of egg hunts. The one at church.

This is where legends were born. A hundred rabid kids running all over the church lawn, fighting and clawing with each other to fill their baskets with the most eggs so we could claim to be the Easter King or Queen- a title that was highly sought after and gave you bragging rights for the rest of the year.

The church hunt also featured a prize egg. A shiny gold egg into which the pastor would ceremoniously place a crisp one dollar bill.

That was like a thousand dollars to us.

These days, people no longer dress up for Easter. I looked out across the congregation at my church this morning and saw people in shorts and trucker hats.

We don’t have huge egg hunts any more. Competition with your peers is frowned upon these days. Every child must have an equal amount of eggs in their basket or there will be lawsuits.

And no more eating egg salad sandwiches and deviled eggs at every meal the following week, or hard boiled eggs in your lunchbox.

The meaning of Easter has not changed since I was a child. We’ve changed.

No more white dresses. No more egg decorating kits. No more boiled eggs in our lunch boxes.

Society tells us that believing in some fairytale about this guy named Jesus rising from the dead so we can also have eternal life is just silly.

To the world, it’s just another day.

I don’t know if leisure suits will ever come back in fashion but there is one thing I know for certain.

It’s not.